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Social Media Analytics and Why They Matter

DISCLAIMER: Please note that I do not work for ABC company nor am I affiliated with them in any way. The following blog post is for academic purposes only.

While regularly posting to your company’s social media profiles is extremely important, this means nothing if your posts aren’t performing well. How do you measure the impact and effectiveness of your social media initiatives? How can you tell if your posts are driving business or whether they’re receiving a lot of fan interaction? This is where analytics comes in. According to Social Media Today, social analytics aggregates and analyzes online conversations and social activity generated across social channels and enables organizations to act on the derived intelligence to drive business results. In other words, analytics provides you with concrete data to help you determine if you’re on the right track with your social media business model.

Below, I will be taking a look at the Facebook and email analytics for ABC company, a health-oriented business in the Central Florida area. The company has a Facebook page, shown below, a Twitter account, a Pinterest page and a YouTube channel. ABC company also sends out a bi-weekly e-newsletter through Bronto Software, which provides a cloud-based marketing platform for retailers to drive revenue through their email, mobile and social campaigns.

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is the platform’s free built-in analytics package. It helps your company make sense of its social media analytics and lets you see how each individual piece of content is connecting with your audience. Using Facebook Insights, your company can see how well certain types of content, including photos, videos, links, and questions, perform in comparison with each other. I will be analyzing the Facebook analytics for ABC company so that I can see what they’re doing well and what needs improvement.

Overview

As you take a look at the above image taken from ABC company’s Facebook page, you can see that the page has received a total of 880 likes, which is a 69 percent increase from the previous time period. This shows that ABC company is doing well in terms of generating page likes. From a marketing perspective, a Facebook like can be the most powerful tool Facebook has to offer. Every time someone “Likes” your page or something on it, he or she exposes it to all their friends, who then have the opportunity to expose it to their friends. In addition, 340,325 friends of fans liked ABC company fan page, which was a 1.31 percent increase. While the company should be happy that it saw an increase in this area, I think it needs to do a better job of attracting friends of their current fans to ensure that this number will be higher in the future. During this time, ABC company had 46 people talking about them, which refers to the number of people who liked, commented or shared their content. Unfortunately, this was a 50.54 percent decrease. Based on this information, it looks like ABC company needs to do a better job of engaging its customers through more interesting posts. Finally, ABC company had a weekly total reach of 5,740, which was an almost 40 percent increase from the week before. In Facebook terms, reach refers to the number of people who have seen your posts. Based on this information, it appears that while lots of people are seeing ABC company’s posts, they are opting not to interact with them. Lets find out why.

On ABC company’s overview page, you can see a breakdown of how each of their posts from May 27-June 2 performed. Facebook Insights provides the reach; the number of engaged users, or the number of people who click on your posts; the number of people who are talking about a specific post; and the virality of a post, or the percentage of people who have created a story from your Page post out of the total number of unique people who have seen it. In other words, the more people engage with your content in relation to how many unique people have seen it determines a particular post’s virality. In the post types section, you can see that the post with the highest level of engagement, which was sent out on May 29, reached 509 people, had 13 users engaged, 10 people talking about it and a virality of 1.96 percent. The post with the highest virality was the National Cancer Survivors Day post the company sent out on June 2. The timeliness of this post was likely the reason behind this.

Reach

ABC company’s target audience on Facebook is in the 25-24 age range with the majority, 28.6 percent being females. More than 5,100 of these fans live in the United States and the majority live in Orlando, which makes sense because this is where ABC company is based. English is the primary language of those logging on, but based on this information provided, fans in Spanish speaking countries seem to also be taking an interesting the company’s Facebook posts.

In terms of reach, ABC company seems to be performing better with viral posts than with organic and paid ones.

Talking About This

ABC Company saw a decrease in the number of people who were talking about the company on April 28 and those who were talking about it on June 2. But the company does seem to be making improvements in this area. After all, their June 2 post was the one that had the most virality.

Bronto

The above screenshot shows the analytics for an e-newsletter ABC company sent out on May 21. According to this report, the company sent this newsletter to 2,624 people. 2,606 people received the email, meaning that there were only 18 bounce backs. Eighteen out of about 2,600 isn’t bad at all, so it seems that ABC company does a good job of keeping up with its customer contact list. That being said, the e-newsletter email could’ve been stronger. Only 661 people opened the email, and 72 of these clicked on it. Unfortunately, none of these people were conversions, and only one forwarded the newsletter to a friend.

There’s always room for improvement

While ABC company currently has a steady number of page views, it’s falling behind in terms of attracting unique visitors to its site. My suggestion would be to make its posts more engaging. While regular status/text posts can be useful, posts of images and even links to an original, high-quality blog article would generate traffic.

Given that most of the company’s traffic is coming from Google, I would recommend that they increase their SEO efforts if they aren’t doing so already. ABC company needs to determine the most appropriate short-tail and long-tail keywords and optimize its site for these words. This would be a great way for them to drive traffic, specifically unique visitors, to their site.

Because females ages 25-34 seem to make up the majority of the page’s traffic, ABC company should try to appeal more to the emotional side of things as well as to health issues that are specifically related to females.

Timely posts with mass appeal, such as the one ABC company sent out on June 2 about National Cancer Survivors Day, are more along the lines of the type of posts they need to be sending out, as these seem to be best received by their followers.

Given that most of its followers are in Orlando, perhaps ABC company could post about specific health concerns that people in the Orlando area might face, be it something as minor as alerting residents of pollen season or something as serious as heart disease or cancer.

In terms of email campaigns, perhaps ABC company could improve its subject line to entice more people to open up these emails. It could also use eye-catching images and be succinct in terms of the length of the text in their emails to convince people to click.

Other channels

ABC company could cross promote in order to increase user engagement and unique visitors to its site. I would recommend that it upload informative, health-related videos to YouTube at least once a week as well as upload eye-catching images to its Pinterest. I think its fans/clients would enjoy seeing infographics that simplify complicated health statistics. Finally, ABC company could utilize hashtags on Twitter to promote discussions, host live Q&A sessions, in which it could answer questions about health concerns people might have, and hold contests.

Future Campaigns and Posts

As I just mentioned, I think the Twitter Q&A sessions would do really well for ABC company. In terms of Facebook, I would recommend that ABC company incorporate more images into its posts and even post daily health facts to educate its followers. The facts could be structured as “Did you know”? posts. In terms of email campaigns, perhaps the company could add a “Sign up for our newsletter” button to its homepage, utilize more effective subject lines, such as “What you need to know about your health this month” and add infographics to the body of its email to instantly draw people in and encourage them to click any links they might’ve included in their email.